Michael Reuben
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Studio: Lionsgate
Rated: PG-13
Film Length: 95 minutes
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1; enhanced for 16:9
Audio: English DD 5.1
Subtitles: English, Spanish
MSRP: $27.98
Disc Format: 1 DVD-5
Package: Keepcase
Insert: None
Theatrical Release Date: Oct. 16, 2009
DVD Release Date: Feb. 16, 2010
Introduction:
Winner of a 2009 Special Jury Prize at Sundance and a 2010 nominee by the Writer’s Guild of America, Chris Rock’s Good Hair looks at both an industry and a subculture. The industry does billions of dollars in sales each year. As for the subculture, I’m wholly unqualified to comment on it, but the film held me in my seat and made me laugh.
The Film:
Most reviews start as the film does – namely, with one of Chris Rock’s daughters coming home crying because she doesn’t have “good” hair. That really happened, but Rock had the idea for the film long before his daughters were born, ever since he’d first experienced the Bronner Bros. International Hair Show, an annual extravaganza in Atlanta to which the film returns repeatedly, because the personalities it finds there are too entertaining and too outlandish to let go.
Reality TV has nothing on these people. The highlight of every year’s Bronner Bros. show is a hairstyling competition that no one would believe if you made it up. A contestant who styles someone’s hair while hanging upside down? Right. Another who creates a hairdo under water? Sure. For the participants, this is deadly serious. To Rock’s credit, he manages to keep a straight face while interviewing each contestant at various stages of the run-up to the competition. He mostly lets people speak for themselves, and that makes the film richer, more human – and funnier.
Beneath the pageantry and the craziness, there’s a lucrative business. It’s no secret that Americans spend a fortune each year on products to make them more attractive, but Good Hair focuses on products marketed to African-American women (and some men), specifically two types: so-called “relaxers” and weaves.
Relaxers are the treatments used to straighten hair that’s naturally curly, crinkly or “nappy”, since, except for a brief period in the Sixties, straight hair has been considered more attractive and desirable. The most powerful and effective chemical relaxer is sodium hydroxide, a/k/a “lye” (although that word is never used in the film), which is toxic stuff. Just to drive home the point, Rock interviews a chemistry professor who puts soft drink cans in a solution of sodium hydroxide, where, after enough time, they dissolve. But when did danger ever dissuade anyone in the pursuit of beauty? Good Hair includes numerous interviews with actors, musicians, professionals, celebrities and ordinary customers at salons on the pain and suffering they’ve endured for the sake of straightening their hair. As one salon patron puts it, hair relaxer is “creamy crack”, because once you let it change your appearance, you can never go back.
(As if to demonstrate that reckless cosmetic behavior transcends race, class and creed, the film also shows one of the contestants in the Bronner Bros. hairstyling show, who happens to be white, getting botox injections in preparation for his big day. I found that harder to watch than any of the hair treatments.)
Some viewers have criticized Good Hair for not delving deeper into the socio-historic reasons why straight hair came to be considered preferable. But that would have taken the film away from its comedic core, and Rock is too smart an entertainer to let that happen.
A different criticism came from no less exalted a source than Roger Ebert, who attacked the film’s accuracy, claiming that no one uses sodium hydroxide anymore. Ebert quoted Wikipedia, but in a surprising instance of sloppy scholarship, he omitted the underlined portion of the quotation: “ecause of the high incidence and intensity of chemical burns, chemical relaxer manufacturers have now switched to other alkaline chemicals, although sodium hydroxide relaxers are still available, used mostly by professionals.” That’s the most important part of the quote, Mr. Ebert, because it’s among professionals that Good Hair is set. It’s in salons and barbershops that we see people getting their hair straightened, and the contestants at the Bronner Bros. show are all professionals. As Rock says in the commentary, he’s met a number of hair care workers with lung damage, and it’s from breathing sodium hydroxide.
The other product on which Good Hair focuses is weaves. If, like me, you knew nothing about hair weaves going in, prepare to be amazed. What some women spend on hair weaves exceeds what many of us spend on home theaters – and that’s not counting upkeep. Rock interviews one salon owner who cheerfully informs him of her “layaway” plan. He also travels to India, from which nearly all human hair for weaves originates. (The tour of one “factory” where it’s processed is both fascinating and creepy.) After watching Good Hair, I did some quick internet research and was astonished to discover how many female celebrities admit to using weaves or extensions. I’ll never look at an elaborately coiffed model the same way again.
What really makes Good Hair watchable is the quality of the interviews. For whatever reason, people seemed to open up to Rock on the subject, whether it was the Bronner Bros. contestants, his former co-star Ice-T (with whom Rock hadn’t worked since New Jack City), hip-hop singers Salt ‘n’ Pepa, actress Nia Long (scarily direct) or Al Sharpton, whom Rock calls “the Dalai Lama of hair”. The funniest material is usually the most personal, and it doesn’t get more personal than hair.
Video:
As best as I can tell from the commentary, Good Hair was shot on video, but it doesn’t have the hard-edged and frequently unpleasant look of many documentaries originated on that format. The film is brightly lit and colorful, and it comes to DVD with a fair amount of detail and little in the way of compression artifacts, aliasing or other telltale signs of NTSC’s limitations. It probably helps that a significant portion of the film consists of talking head interviews, which are relatively easy to light and don’t involve the kind of complex motion that challenges a compressionist.
Audio:
The DD 5.1 track has two jobs, and it does both of them well. It clearly reproduces all the voices, whether it’s interview subjects or Rock’s voiceover commentary; and it nicely conveys the film’s musical score, a combination of pop tunes and a jazzy blues track written by Marcus Miller (whose credits include Everybody Hates Chris).
Special Features:
Commentary by Chris Rock and Executive Producer Nelson George. Rock and George chat amiably about the film’s background and the process of gathering the various interviews and tours that comprise the film. One frustrating note is the many references to sequences dropped from the final cut; at several points, George expressly indicates that deleted footage will be on the DVD, but none is included.
Perhaps the most revealing comments indicate how the film’s focus changed. It started as a film about the Bronner Bros. show. Only as the filmmakers delved further into the subject did they fully grasp the richness of the material and the topic’s potential scope.
Trailers. The film’s trailer is included. At startup, the disc plays trailers for Precious, The September Issue, Facing Ali, More Than a Game and I Can Do Bad All by Myself; these can be skipped with the chapter forward button.
In Conclusion:
It’s hard enough to make a documentary that’s interesting, harder still to make one that’s genuinely funny, and hardest of all to accomplish it without doing so at others’ expense (the last item being a trick Michael Moore has never mastered). Good Hair achieves all three objectives. I just wish Lionsgate had given us the supplements that clearly could have been provided.
Equipment used for this review:
Denon 955 DVD player
Samsung HL-T7288W DLP display
Lexicon MC-8
Sunfire Cinema Grand amplifier
Monitor Audio floor-standing fronts and MA FX-2 rears
Boston Accoustics VR-MC center
SVS SB12-Plus sub